Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare

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On View

Date:

1877

Artist:

Claude MonetFrench, 1840-1926

About this artwork

The Impressionists frequently paid tribute to the modern aspects of Paris. Their paintings abound with scenes of grand boulevards and elegant, new blocks of buildings, as well as achievements of modern construction such as iron bridges, exhibition halls, and train sheds. Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare was an especially appropriate choice of subject for Claude Monet in the 1870s. The terminal, linking Paris and Normandy, where Monet’s technique of painting outdoors had been nurtured in the 1860s, was also the point of departure for towns and villages to the west and north of Paris frequented by the Impressionists. Monet completed eight of his twelve known paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare in time for the third Impressionist exhibition, in 1877, probably placing them in the same gallery.

Monet chose to focus his attention here on the glass-and-iron train shed, where he found an appealing combination of artificial and natural effects: the rising steam of locomotives trapped within the structure, and daylight penetrating the large, glazed sections of the roof. Monet’s depictions of the station inaugurated what was to become for him an established pattern of painting a specific motif repeatedly in order to capture subtle and temporal atmospheric changes. But the series also represented his last attempt to deal with urban realities: from this point on in his career, Monet would be largely a painter of landscapes.

Richard R. Brettell, “The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France,” in A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, ed. Andrea P. A. Belloli, exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984), p. 48.

Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, entries written and compiled by Sally Ruth May (Art Institute of Chicago, 1993), p. 155 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, Treasures of 19th- and 20th-Century Painting: The Art Institute of Chicago, with an introduction by James N. Wood (Art Institute of Chicago/Abbeville, 1993), p. 70 (ill.).

Charles F. Stuckey, “Chicago’s Fortune: Patrons of Modern Paintings and The Art Institute of Chicago,” in Art Institute of Chicago and Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Shikago bijutsukan ten: Kindai kaiga no 100-nen [Masterworks of modern art from the Art Institute of Chicago], exh. cat. (Asahi Shinbunsha, 1994), p. 18.

George T. M. Shackelford, “The Age of Impressionism,” in Emily Ballew Neff and George T. M. Shackelford, American Painters in the Age of Impressionism, exh. cat. (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1994), pp. 19; 20, fig. 7.

Joseph Baillio and Cora Michael, “Chronological and Pictorial Survey of the Life and Career of Claude Monet,” in Wildenstein and Co., Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff, exh. cat. (Wildenstein, 2007), p. 166.

Brian Dudley Barrett, Artist on the Edge: The Rise of Coastal Artists’ Colonies, 1880–1920, with Particular Reference to Artists’ Communities around the North Sea (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), p. 43 (ill.).